Prof. Sam Lawler@sundogplanets@mastodon.social
I'm sorry to see obituaries for Dr. Gladys West this morning: https://thezebra.org/2026/01/18/dr-gladys-west-mathematician-whose-work-made-gps-possible-dies-at-95/
She was brilliant and did a lot of incredibly important scientific work, a lot of which was hidden/uncredited early on, because she was a mathematician in a time when "computer" was a job description.
Prof. Sam Lawler@sundogplanets@mastodon.social
A paper from a few years ago by Dung et al. looked at how often programmers were not credited as authors in genetics research papers from the 1970s and 1980s, but were acknowledged as programmers who ran the code for the analysis, and how often those uncredited scientists were women https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article/211/2/363/5931132?login=false
It used to be very common practice to have a programmer do your analysis for you, and they weren't considered a co-author (probably because many were women)
